Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Jacob deGrom needs more decisions to get more wins. You know, like the Cy Young award winners.

Jacob deGrom is having his finest season, possibly a Cy Young award winning season. Current conventional wisdom is that wins, as in won/lost record, do not matter. You've heard of the phrase "kill the win". But that current conventional wisdom does not address deGrom's real problem in 2018: not enough DECISIONS.

Last night at Yankee Stadium deGrom got credit for a win when his Mets beat the Yankees 8-5. Yankee ace Luis Severino continued his second half slump and was charged with the loss.

Here are the won/lost records of the pitching aces of the two New York teams, neither of whom has relieved in 2018:
D: Decisions
GS: Games Started

W

L

D

GS

D/GS

Luis Severino

15

6

21

25

84.0%

Jacob deGrom

7

7

14

24

58.3%

Severino has more wins than deGrom has decisions. In fact Severino was 14-2 on July 7 when he went five innings in Toronto for an 8-5 win. So Severino had as many wins five weeks ago as deGrom has decisions now. Since July 7 Severino is 1-4 in 6 starts.

OK, let's digress with some very conventional current conventional wisdom.

Al Sothoron ... One hundred years ago (1918) ... 1.94 earned run average ... pitching for the fifth-place St. Louis Browns, he finished with a 12-12 ... last qualifying pitcher to have an E.R.A. below 2.00 without a winning record. ..

“I kind of like wins,” Larry Rothschild, the Yankees’ pitching coach, said recently. “I know it’s not the soup of the day, but I like them.” ...

Eight years ago, Seattle’s Felix Hernandez led the American League in E.R.A. and innings and won the Cy Young Award despite a 13-12 record. It was a watershed moment in the voting process...Scherzer should still be considered the leader now, not because of his record (15-5), but because he leads the N.L. in strikeouts, innings, walks-plus-hits per inning pitched and strikeout-to-walk ratio — all the categories that connote dominance and durability...Al Sothoron. In 1919, the season after his hard-luck .500 record, he earned 20 wins.
_______________________________

First off, Al Sothoron:

W

L

D

GS

D/GS

G

Jacob deGrom

7

7

14

24

58.3%

24

Browns

Browns

Browns

Al Sothoron

W

L

D

GS

D/GS

G

W

L

G

1918

12

12

24

24

100.0%

29

58

64

122

1919

20

12

32

30

106.7%

40

67

72

139

The Times writer forgot about that World War thing, which reduced the number of games played: 122, 139.

Also, Sothoron pitched some games in relief: 5, 10. At least in 1919 Sothoron must have won some games as a relief pitcher.

12-12 seems more substantive than 7-7, which seems puny, as if deGrom didn't always show up for work or didn't complete his shift.

Which brings us to Felix Hernandez, the Cy Young award winner current voters point to as evidence that they are modern and intelligent. So, let's compare deGrom with Hernandez in his 2010 Cy Young award winning season.

W

L

D

GS

D/GS

G

Jacob deGrom

7

7

14

24

58.3%

24

Felix Hernandez

13

12

25

34

73.5%

34

Finally, let's check Max Scherzer in his Cy Young award winning seasons ... and so far in 2018.